Morning Update: Ahmadinejad Addresses Obama

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his first public statement on the U.S. elections, offering President-elect Barack Obama congratulations on his victory and calling on Obama to implement a foreign policy of “non-interference.” The BBC says Ahmadinejad’s gesture is the first official message of goodwill to an American leader from an Iranian president since the country’s Islamist revolution in 1979.

DHS: In a statement Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff outlined the Department of Homeland Security’s plans for the Obama administration’s transition. In the coming months, Chertoff said, DHS will “include the transition team in the ongoing series of tabletop exercises that we have been running for some time, to educate the new administration on incident response procedures.”